Last night outside the Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, the groups Women Are Real and Known Heretic, along with right-wing influencer Brandi Kruse, hosted a rally to show their support for Indiana Fever bench player Sophie Cunningham’s ignorant comments about trans inclusion in sports and celebrate their lack of support for female athletes in general. Around 30 losers showed up for the rally, and it was probably the closest anybody in that group had ever gotten to a professional women’s sports event.
Asked by reporter Roberta at a post-game press conference about the rally, Sophie’s comments, and the impact of this conversation on locker room vibes, a Fever PR rep read the following from a laptop: “Neither our organization nor Sophie had any knowledge of this demonstration and no contact with its organizers. Our only goal as a team, whether at home or away, is to win basketball games and make Fever fans for life, and we are united in that mission.”
This is just one piece of the fallout from an ESPN profile in which Cunningham volunteered her opinion on trans women in sports, claiming she doesn’t “hate trans” but then going on to say: “I think that I am here to extend love. But I also think with that love is truth, being honest. And I want to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”
Girl — if you’re referring to trans girls as “biological men,” you do, indeed, “hate trans.”
Cunningham continued to double down on this response when asked by press and on her own social media, calling it “common sense.”
Generally, I believe the impact of any single celebrity’s opinion on any given political issue is overestimated, and that journalists writing articles like the one I’m writing right now are just plucking low-hanging fruit, participating in an ultimately harmful outrage cycle that favors hot takes over genuine engagement with complex issues. But trans inclusion in sports is a very unique case. Due to an effective and audacious campaign from the right-wing asshats obsessed with the distraction and financial rewards provided by said manufactured controversy and due to all kinds of misinformation around the science at play here and deliberate confusion about what trans inclusion at the elite level actually looks like — trans inclusion in sports remains, sadly, a contentious issue across the political spectrum. It’s arguably a political issue for which popular opinion has been determined far more by celebrity discourse than by actual first-hand experience or by information shared by actual lawmakers or stakeholders. This issue is just four hot takes and J.K. Rowling’s cat in a trench coat.
I’m not actually certain that Cunningham’s opinion matters — but I’m also not certain it doesn’t. It probably matters a great deal for queer residents of the Indianapolis metro area who’d like to feel as welcome at home games as fans do in other cities across the country. It might still be an opportunity to dig into what’s wrong with takes like hers.
Who Is Sophie Cunningham and Why Is She So Wrong?
Known as “MAGA Barbie” for her assumed political leanings and approximate physical similarities to a Barbie doll, Indiana Fever guard/forward Sophie Cunningham has been a lightning rod of controversy on and off the court, with a career that began in the dry heat of Phoenix, Arizona before landing her in the midwest in 2025, where her friendship with and proximity to Caitlin Clark elevated her to a new level of fame. (Her behavior has consistently been subject to a stark racial double standard in the league: Her physical aggression earns fans and supporters, while Black players exhibiting remotely similar behavior earn racialized harassment and media criticism.)
She pushed back against the MAGA Barbie accusations in an interview with the Times in September of 2025, claiming her political views were “right in the middle,” and that she considers herself a moderate rather than an outright Democrat or Republican. These claims didn’t dampen the right wing’s affection for its white, blonde, conventionally attractive star, and her anti-trans opinions have earned praise this past week across the spectrum of bigotry, including support from Donald Trump himself as well as noted scourge J.K. Rowling.
Her assertion is fascinating coming from an athlete who, earlier in that 2026 ESPN piece, described a childhood that involved playing sports with actual, literal, cisgender biological men. She was a place-kicker on her high school football team, and, per the profile, when a young Cunningham “wasn’t playing against older girls, she was playing against boys, but even then, skepticism persisted” about her inclusion on girls sports teams. Her parents fielded criticism that Sophie was too old and too big to be playing on the teams she was playing on, that her style of play was too physical and aggressive. Under the legislation Cunningham now seemingly supports, that scrutiny would’ve likely subjected her to invasive sex testing.
Youth sports are, in fact, often co-ed, and without incident or locker rooms. At the high school level, women who want to play baseball or tackle football in high school do, in fact, play on the men’s team, with cisgender men, because high schools don’t offer those sports for women. (I learned this editing the Autostraddle Sports Issue, which includes stories on women’s football and baseball!) That’s what Sophie did, and God as my witness, she survived.
Of course, Sophie’s not just attempting to defend women from playing amongst people assigned male at birth, but against them, or pose some kind of threat in the locker room. These threats are imaginary. But ultimately the only woman Sophie is helping here is herself.
There is currently more legislation in the pipeline to prevent trans girls and women from playing sports than there are trans girls playing sports at any recorded level. When Utah governor Spencer Cox faced a bill banning transgender kids from sports, he said of the 75k high school students in the state playing sports, only four were known to be trans, and only one of those four was a girl. In South Dakota, a similar bill was passed despite, again, only one trans girl trying to play sports in the entire state. But this manufactured controversy has proven to be profitable and played well on both sides of the aisle, as Cunningham has so adeptly demonstrated, again.
Many WNBA Players and Coaches Have Spoken Out To Support Trans Inclusion
The WNBA is arguably the most politically progressive major professional sports league in this country. This is unsurprising, of course, for a women’s league that is mostly Black and very queer, a league celebrated and noted for its legacy of progressive political activism. There aren’t any trans women in the WNBA (there has been one out nonbinary player, Layshia Clarendon), but many WNBA players are the targets of persistent harassment for various failures to conform to gender norms. Brittney Griner, who is 6’9” and has a deep voice, and was bullied throughout her childhood for these qualities, remains unable to appear on social media without a cadre of incels putting down their video game consoles and swarming the feed with sharp burns like “a man for sure.”
Griner is also amongst many WNBA players who have voiced their support for trans athletes. When asked about trans inclusion in 2023, Griner affirmed: “Everyone deserves the right to play. Everyone deserves the right to come here and sit in these seats and feel safe and not feel that there’s a threat and that they can’t be who they are.”
Las Vegas Aces WNBA player Brianna Turner, formerly of the Indiana Fever, wrote a USA Today op-ed in April in response to the IOC’s policy shift declaring “Don’t use athletes like me to exclude trans women.” She noted, accurately, that “policies that single out transgender women and athletes with intersex variations do not protect women’s sports. They manufacture a scapegoat while the real challenges to women’s sports go unaddressed: unequal funding, limited access to training and facilities, pay disparities, male-dominated leadership, gender-based violence and harassment across race, sex, sexual orientation and gender identity.” For example, last year a Fever staff member was fired for sexual harassment, and Turner says they were encouraged to keep quiet about it.
Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve wrote in Sports Illustrated back in 2021, “when we welcome all woman athletes, including transgender woman athletes, to bring their full authentic selves to the game, we are stronger as individual players and as a team.”
South Carolina coach and former WNBA player Dawn Staley was asked for her stance on the issue during the NCAA Final Four in 2024 and affirmed her support for inclusion.
Australian baller Anneli Maley, currently on the Phoenix Mercury, has advocated for inclusion, saying in an interview, “the biggest threat to women’s sport is not trans women, it’s actually men thinking that it’s trans women.”
Sue Bird has also been a vocal supporter of inclusion and, along with Layshia Clarendon, Natalie Achonwa and Brianna Turner, signed a 2024 Athlete Ally petition favoring inclusion. Unrivaled co-founder and Lynx superstar Napheesa Collier said in a July 2026 MPR interview that trans youth “have every right” to what sports provide. Breanna Stewart called for “establishing policies that are inclusive of the transgender community and afford them every opportunity to succeed both in sport and in society.” (But she also has a Harry Potter-branded shoe.) Candace Parker joined 170 other athletes in filing a friend-of-the-court brief against an anti-trans sports inclusion law in Idaho. Last night, Stephanie Dolson wore a t-shirt supporting trans people to the game against Indiana.
On an episode of their podcast, Unsupervised, WNBA veterans Syd Colson and Theresa Plaisance recalled a recent journey to a restaurant in Annapolis where they found themselves in line behind a man in an American flag t-shirt with the words SAVE WOMEN’S SPORTS emblazoned on the back. TP recalled, “I was like, no way Syd, I really think this is an anti-trans shirt.”
“One hundred percent,” Syd echoed.
Sure enough, the shirt had “xx xy” printed on its chest pocket. TP joked: “The thoughts that went through my head in this moment were for me to walk up to him… and say, hey sir, women like me across the world thank you for saving women’s sports because we’re so terrified of trans women ruining sport.“
“Insane,” Syd agreed.
TP — a 6’5″, masculine lesbian with a deep voice — concluded, in jest, “So thank you sir. Women like me — and I know you are representing women like me everywhere— thank you.”
All Gender Non Conforming Athletes Will Be Harmed By Anti-Trans Legislation
Historically, it’s not just trans women, but any woman who seems too “masculine” in any regard who have been the most common targets of invasive sex testing, abuse and harassment. Furthermore, women of color are particularly vulnerable to this, wrote Orion Rummler in the 19th after the targeting of cis boxer Imane Khelif at the 2024 Olympics, concluding “women of color are the ones most at risk of being targeted for not adhering to fragile notions of gender and unrealistic expectations of femininity.”
There are myriad ways in which legislation Cunningham supports serve as a gateway to further legal discrimination against all female athletes. As soccer legend Megan Rapinoe wrote two weeks ago in Marie Claire, “In their witch hunt for a few trans kids in the entire state who play school sports, I-638’s backers will drive thousands of girls out of sports because their parents cannot afford the necessary testing or refuse to submit their daughters to genital inspections. That’s a feature, not a bug, of these laws. Preventing girls from playing sports is the whole point. Spaces that leave girls and women feeling empowered are the spaces they want to constrict — and then eliminate.”
The harm these policies have on trans women and girls has been widely documented and discussed in spaces like this one. But, as athletes like Megan Rapinoe and Brianna Turner have made plain in their own public statements, these policies — harmful enough at face value — have wider-reaching, more sinister applications. The Heritage Foundation literally and plainly wants to dismantle Title IX altogether. The manufactured controversy around sports bans is also a deliberate strategy. Polling showed it was the easiest anti-trans issue to earn support for, so that’s what they went after, knowing that by agreeing that trans girls are “really boys” when it comes to sports, wrote Katelyn Burns for MSNBC in her analysis of anti-trans election ads, “they would also be considered boys in the bathroom, boys in the medical offices, and thus, denied access to female hormones. If trans girls are boys when they’re playing sports, then trans women should be considered men in all contexts.”
While many are calling for the WNBA itself to speak out, any type of satisfactory or progressive position from the league feels unlikely; they’ve barely managed to summon the will to speak out against racism. The best a league response will net us is fresh material for the outrage cycle.
Three days after her remarks garnered waves of attention, Cunningham’s new adidas shoe sold out in under 24 hours. Also, it’s the colors of the trans flag. Shooting yourself in the foot is a fascinating way to sell shoes, I guess.
